


One Flesh

by PsychoPomposity



Category: Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Abuse, F/M, Mention of Past Assault, Mention of Racism, Nightmares, Orphans, Psychic Bond, Psychological Trauma, Violence, ritual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 19:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychoPomposity/pseuds/PsychoPomposity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mina's dreams grow increasingly disturbed as the Count communicates with her in her travels across Europe</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> This was something of an experiment to try and write a Mina/Dracula relationship in a way I felt was faithful to the original novel. As a warning, it's fairly brutal, largely one-sided, and far from romantic, and while there's no explicit sexual content, several of the passages are patterned to evoke a non-consensual scenario. 
> 
> This piece also uses a different historical headcanon regarding the Count than the popular interpretation that he is Vlad III of Wallachia. In an attempt to keep faithful to his insistence that he is both an ethnic Székely and a descendant of the Drăculeşti, I've made him the bastard child of Michael the Brave (who claimed Drăculeşti descent) and one of his Székely allies' wives.

The whir of the trains wheels faded into the background as Mina tried again to sleep, all she feared at last being outweighed by the reality of her own exhaustion. She had still made no mention the dreams, unremembered as they were. It was enough that the others knew that the door could open in either direction and took that strategic point into consideration. To trouble them further would tax them unfairly.

She tried not to dwell on the matter. Instead she counted the rise and fall of her breaths, remaining still as she waited for unconsciousness to overtake her. While it was probably the scream of the whistle that roared against the thrum of the motion all around her, within it she could already hear a familiar metal tinge, similar in its ethereality to a glass harmonica. _He_ was speaking to her, and as she plunged into darkness, she knew that she would have no option but to listen.

" _Come to me."_ It was beginning again. Fogged images flitted by, hazed over like faded tintypes until they came into focus. It always started with memories. She saw herself as she had been as girl, black hair and tan skin standing in contrast against the grey of her undyed dress, her face unflinching as somebody openly discussed her "situation" in the drawing room, with its blue-and-white wallpaper making it look as though they were holding counsel from the interior of a giant piece of china.

Their voices were muted, but for all her efforts to do otherwise she could not help but hear them. Not that hearing gave her grounds to object. Her mother's sister had done a charity as regarded her, and it was ungrateful to expect it not to be spoken of.

"It seems 'Mister' Murray left little enough to do much else with Wilhelmina, I'm afraid – but she's a bright girl in spite of..." Her aunt either trailed off or spoke the last words in a voice too low to reach her.

It was uneasy looking at the scene from outside of herself, not only because it was an image she'd not wanted to recall, but more so that it was one she'd not wished to share. Ah, but this was not sharing, was it? Frustrated, she thought to clench her fists and watched as the child in front of her did so in her stead, black eyes staring toward the white ceiling lest a tear should spill down before she composed herself. Looking back as an adult it seemed more pathetic than brave, but she'd taken it as a point of honor somewhere along the way that she ought'nt cry on her own behalf – Dickens and the Friday papers knew there were a thousand orphans in "situations" better worth crying over.

" _You and I share quite a bit – both now and before."_

"Don't pretend to understand me."

The retort came as fast as she thought it, but no reply was given, not in words anyway. She felt her feet fall on a sunlit stone floor as she realized the scene had changed, déjà vu washing over her as she recognized that the memory wasn't hers. Looking through a mullioned window she saw that Csíkszereda was again on fire with the colors of autumn; the thin body she inhabited once more walking with echoed steps in one of the houses of his mother's husband's estate. He had shown her such things before. There was a stillness before the door opened and she remembered the events anew, feeling her foreign hand fidgeting with the cut-work that ran along shirtsleeves too big for their wearer. Today was the day he would learn the name to which he belonged.

 _Dracul. Draculea. Drăculeşti._ She tried to rest control of the vision as it unfolded itself. It was bad enough to walk through this half-reality, having him try to exploit the grain of pity her heart allowed by making her witness this – but to make her _live_ it was another thing altogether. She felt something like goosebumps prick her inwardly as she mechanically twisted the pommel of a never-used sword in his belt, unable to escape that this was _his_ body she'd been forced into. The woman who spoke to him seemed prematurely old, and regarded him with a less than maternal tenderness. The _primor_ had long ago decided –and rightly so– that the hospitality she'd offered the Dragon at Karcfalva was suspect.

" _I've long known what it is to live between worlds."_ And so he had. Time faded, flew, divided itself, and darkness cut across the room's arched windows and faded tapestries. Without warning, Mina was back on that white sea of a counterpane, wrists held down as two burning needles lit through her flesh. Her lips opened in a silent gasp as she arched her neck into the bite. It was better to be here and be herself. _"Mihály Dracula was slaughtered, choked on his own ambition. Basta's dogs cut him down like a animal. The bloody field became the father I was born to."_ Stop. Even in the dark of the bedroom, she could feel the eyes of his "brothers" upon him, whispering in hallways like white-kerchiefed old woman gaggling round a szóhordók. _"Székely but not Székely, The blood of the Impaler and his kin run into obscurity, a relic of a dead man's dream."_ Mina did her utmost to maintain her calm, even as the seep of her life's blood made her dizzy. "The boy you parade in front of me is dead as well," she thought matter-of-factly.

Things changed all at once. There was darkness again, and then snow – snow beating silently against the schoolroom windowpanes as she looked outside. "Mister" Murray had pennies enough that his daughter could afford to be one degree better than a governess – learning to teach schoolgirls the same reticence she had had to learn on her own. There would be a place allotted her as her black hair turned grey. She remembered thinking such things throughout many winters, as the clean fire-lit building emptied itself of its other charges and left her alone with her own thoughts.

It was without surprise that the images before her folded upon themselves again, and she barely raised her head when she saw the familiar youth in the blank hills that stretched out before a window that ought look out toward Exeter Cathedral – his homespun cloak fluttering in the wind as he traced figures through the falling flakes with a blade too heavy for him to hold gracefully. They had robbed the Székelys of their birthrights but still demanded they hasten to the bloody sword, and with no birthright of his own he would hasten all the swifter. The Tartars, the Turks, the Austrians... He would be glad to fight them all someday, glad to earn his name as that Dracula of old had. His unsteady sword blazed as it caught the light – a setting sun which was already turning the vast expanse of white beneath it to red.

He did not speak to her further before she heard the sound of another whistle, and woke from one burning world to another, the train crawling under the same shining disc that she'd just managed to catch in her memory. Mina felt her forehead instinctively and found the same puckered ridges of a scar still there. She took a deep breath, knowing who had been with her and little else beyond that. It was all just short of waking up from a nightmare. Nightmares could be explained, however. Nightmares weren't _real._

She was self-conscious as she refused breakfast, Jonathan running his hand over her fingers as he tried to coax her to take at least a little bit of _something._ Inwardly, she shuddered as her husband touched her, petrified that something inside of her might reach across her skin to touch him back.

 

* * *

 

Another twilight saw them at an overcrowded inn near Varna, the others packing haphazardly into a single room while leaving her to sleep alone – in exile from her spouse with one gallant man or another stopping by on the hour to see that she was safe. Mina was self-conscious as she paced across the unfinished floor, catching glimpses of herself in the window. She was changing, either through the poison within her veins or through the despisal of her own body it evoked in her. It had became further apparent how thin she'd grown as she undid her stays, the whalebone hanging awkwardly against her ribs for want of flesh.

She'd undressed but did not recall yet lying in the bed when she became aware of the familiar scent of dusty streets, of incense, and of ironwork, which invariably brought with it the always present coppery remembrance of blood. _"You know what anger is."_ It had started. "All men do." Battles raked themselves across the shared plane of their minds as they whispered at one another. The Turks were sleepless. The schoolroom never silent. _"Ah. But you are no man."_ And she wasn't. Never had pretended to be, for all that girls gossiped about just what sort of woman she wasn't while Katie clipped _Penny Paper_ articles to slip into her practice-book. "Neither are you – not now in any event."

Time and setting rearranged themselves again, as they rode _ventre à terre_ up the grey ribbon of a road, into the mouth of the mountains. The tenth guest was late, and the brothers chided him from under their hoods, their somber voices echoing with the same intonation madame used to outline the incompatibility of cycling and respectability. Pomp and ceremony. One had to stomach one's portion of absurdities to become an initiate. Stop. "It's not the same." Different rituals for different ages. _"A scholomance lies hidden in more places than one might think. A black rooster's tongue might let you whisper to the seven devils as sure as an orange peel might spell out you lover's name. And then there's candle-wax, flower petals..._

Stop. Mina had taken no stock in such things. Warmth filled her nostrils as she sat before the dim glow of a fireplace burning itself out, a bubbly girl of seventeen flickering pale and golden in its light. Lucy Westenra was eating an apple before the vanity glass. "Whomever shall my true love be..." Mina had told her such charms were nonsense on top of an excuse to stay up until midnight, and Lucy's face had fallen as the mirror remained empty. " _Almost no stock. Not all lovers cast reflections."_ No. The dying fire wound its way into a half-grinning moon - the mirror now a window onto a familiar bedroom in Hillingham. She refused to watch, brought herself back to other places, other times. The dock at Hamburg, standing disheveled with a single summer dress folded in a carpet bag. Exeter. The glide of her bicycle along the road to the quay towards poor Jonathan, flustered as he nearly stumbled into her, arms full of blue books. St. Mary's in Whitby. The chapel in Pest. _The bedroom at Purfleet._ No. Her husband unconsciously flinched as a bladed hand grasped his throat, and once more she and the Count were face to face, a dull red reflection cast from his eyes to hers as he wound the chain of memories back into his grasp. _"Blood of my Blood. Kin of my Kin."_

Frightened as she was, she didn't struggle. She never struggled when they came back to this point. In this instant she could always hate him unconditionally, and hate was something she could hold to. _"Across land and sea. My companion and helper."_ He held her loose hair with a caressing hand, his cool breath lighting on her lips, just short of a kiss, and slowly _–slowly–_ he lowered her to the bed. Her muscles went rigid as she waited, trying to stare past him as she anticipated the pain of what was to come. With cunning grace he tilted back her chin, softly pressed his lips to the side of her arched neck, and without violence removed them. _"Memory makes a poor witness, szeretett."_ The black room burst into light, candles dotting the darkness in every direction until it was no more.

She stood suddenly, swathed in white linen and clutching the handle of a curved knife of bronze-colored stuff. They were somewhere else again, taking part in a different spectacle. The voices under the mountain echoed around her in a soft sibilant tongue that sounded like a relation of Latin, forming words she nevertheless understood, either through repetition or the logic of dreams. "...for seven times seventy seven years to wander the earth..." She knew also, of course, the young man who knelt, bound, blindfolded, and emblazoned in Pagan trappings –sigils painted in red– his bared throat at the center-point of the proceedings. "...seventy-seven times seventy-seven more beneath..." The Count –or whatever he might have been called while still a man– trembled and smiled all at once, thin naked chest heaving out of step with the chant. _"Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh."_ Beneath the cloth she felt his eyes still burning upon her.

It was evident how this ended, had ended, would end – and Mina hesitated, imagining he must take some pleasure in either eventuality that lay before her. To spare him or not it made no difference. He'd find a way to make it something he'd wanted – everything spiraling and tracing back to some point he might latch onto and batten upon. _"I want only your will."_ Yes. _Only_ her will. She tried once more to deny him... pulling scraps of her own life to the foreground in the hopes of papering it over. Music. Sea foam. Bells. The sound of sand under her shoes as she read the letter. It all seemed to weave its way into the cacophony of the scene before her. "Seven-hundred-seventy-seven times seven.." Their voices blent with the shriek of circling mews, the fluttering of wings on glass. The bedroom again. The fire all around them like unto his eyes. The scent of dust like his breath as it intermingled with the residue of dried sweat and the omnipresent smell of blood layered over it.

No. She watched her hand extend, and realized it did so under her own power. For all the base feelings that she betrayed in acting, there was something exulting –gloating even– within her as a flurry of wounds blossomed across his body, interrupting the patterns written across it. Over and over and over she stabbed: his chest, limbs, face... never his throat, however obvious the ritual's intended culmination might be. She was tired of his games, tired of _him,_ tired of memories. "My will isn't yours." If he wanted her to reenact this moment for him, he could learn to remember it in pain. Her eyes widened as she watched his brave expression dissolve into a series of gasping unvoiced screams.

She was not certain when it was that she stopped, the panorama behind them forever frozen around the ceremony unfinished. Her hands were slick with blood – both his and hers from where the blade had slipped in her grasp. His one intact red eye stared up at her, veiled by the dullness of death, and as she gazed back upon it she could feel a lump in her throat as she sobbed herself back into wakefulness. A rare sunny day dawned over the Bulgarian city, illuminating dust motes all around her as she pulled herself up from the covers.

As always, she tried to hold onto what she had seen and keep it with her, and before it faded she managed to scrawl a few lines of modified Pitman's into the diary she'd laid out on the bedstand: "Blood. Candles. Killed him."

 

* * *

 

The days grew shorter as they wound their way southward. The dreams never stopped, the back pages of her journal filling themselves with stray words. "Blood. Purfleet." "Hands on face." "Exeter again." "Blood" "Born of the Dragon." Mina maintained her silence despite these scraps of evidence, realizing that whatever it was that occupied her in the night had left her ashamed. It was bad enough what they'd already been witness to, to try to explain more... No. The red token on her brow spoke loudly enough. Nobody need know what lay beneath it.

In the meantime, repetition and resignation had dulled her fears considerably, although it would be a falsehood to call herself unafraid of the evenings. Sleep was still a necessity for as little good as it seemed to do her, awakening each morning with an exhaustion greater than the night before. As they pushed on she felt as though a part of that shadowy world still clung to her throughout each day, steadily tugging her back into the world she'd escaped in waking.

" _You are becoming more like yourself – more like me."_ Mina thought at times she heard him during the day, although it was uncertain if the voice was his or her own imagining. Whoever spoke it spoke true, in any event. She felt more like _something_ – less than something as well. She never seemed to notice the cold anymore, as awful as the recent spat of storms had been. Jonathan had hesitated to touch her when they'd parted in Galatz. Perhaps he was afraid of her seeming fragility, this sickness continuing to wear her ragged. Perhaps he was afraid of something else. She'd pressed their numb hands together, nevertheless, watching as the sun reflected in his pale hair.

When she dreamed, it perturbed her to find that the Count seemed no closer than he did otherwise –while waking, while mesmerized, in all those thresholds in between these things– it all felt the same. They ran through much the same motions each night. Twenty-three years of her life pitted against nearly three-hundred of his. It seemed impossible each time to think that she'd forgotten all that had transpired before. Each night, however, all had clarity again and nothing could be hidden. It could only be changed. They rode on the endless expanse of the Székelyföld until the horse's legs ceased to touch the earth and animal flesh turned to the whirl and groan of modern machinery. The quiet of her neatly compartmentalized girlhood rages drowned and then burst as they melded themselves to the fury of the battlefield. Scholomances and schoolrooms, just as he'd said. Two childhoods. Two escapes. Two hearts beating parallel to one another as they were brought to their respective altars. She could not say they were dissimilar anymore, and that angered her, and in anger she only felt all the more like him. "It's not the same." _"It will be."_

She fought, of course, as he pulled her through these same movements. Unseen fathers and unspoken retorts – and always the same two bloody scenes as the final swell roared across their shared landscape – him under the mountain and her atop the bed, each repetition painful in a new way. Sometimes he killed her. Sometimes she him. Sometimes neither. He circled her, chased her through victories and defeats, played them out again and again but never seemed satisfied with any ending that emerged. "You will never make the two events equal." She knelt again on the bed, her hands clammy with sweat from trying to writhe out of his grip. "You went to your death of your own volition." Her words betrayed her weariness. _"...and you have yet to die, Wilhelmina Murray. We shall see how you compose yourself when you do."_

The room dissolved and she was surrounded once more by snow – not the wet rainy slush that fell on the cobblestones of Exeter, but the same snow that had already been falling when she and the professor had set up camp. She was struck by scent of pine sap and cold air, and thought she must either be awake or dreaming that she was. His voice welled inside of her as she stirred from the bundle of furs and wool in which she was encased. _"You are a long way from home. Will you be content to go back?"_

Her "yes" was instinctive, automatic... even flippant.

" _Will you bow your head to fit your age's yolk at last, then? Keep yourself out of sight again, out of the world of men and men's brains?"_

"You paint a grim picture for one so eager to bow the heads of others."

" _Our heads have both been bowed long enough, haven't they, Wilhelmina?"_

"And mine will not do so for you!" She sat up, defiant as she gazed into the darkness. "Not willingly!" She didn't believe herself entirely. Her declaration felt trite and hollow, the stuff said at the climax of an Adelphi melodrama.

" _That might be an eventuality I face, yet willing or unwilling..."_ She thought he was on the verge of laughing at her _"..you must know how this will end, girl. Do you think your gallant gentlemen will run me down? That with all these centuries you have now lived, you think I haven't the strength to outpace them or the cunning to countermand them? Little fool, I saw your plans before you thought them, and have set snares in which they will be yet be caught."_

Mina tried to remain calm, even knowing he must already be aware of how he had shaken her. "If you are assured of your victory," she asked at last, "of what matter to you is my willingness?" The words were, as always, unspoken, and yet she felt herself begin to choke.

The black sky was fading to grey above them. His answer was so faint as to seem another product of her own imagining.

" _Because I desire it."_

 

* * *

 

Mina's recollection of the visitation swiftly evaporated within the pale light of day, and the lines she scrawled were barely finished before the clouds came back to settle over her mind. "He knows. Wants me." The handful of dots and scribbles had lost their significance almost as soon as they spread themselves across the page. Knows what? Wants to what end? There was a meaning to it she felt she ought remember, but she couldn't ferret it out.

Again she was tempted to confess all to Van Helsing, but once more she checked herself, remembering how little "all" entailed. There was nothing to be done, not with the information she had, and while the faint possibility that hypnosis might assist in recovering such dreams had occurred to her, she was loathe to open that avenue unless it was absolutely necessary, fearing –and in all probability fearing rightly– that something would step across the threshold if she gave it space to do so. She tried to keep her attention on the journey ahead, a grim sense of suppressed panic shadowing over her as the short day stretched on, her and the professor riding in silence across the plain.

The numbness which ran through her body had grown more and more encompassing, and as the haze of the living world galloped past her, Mina felt less and less attached to it. Her thoughts, always near to Jonathan as they were, took morbid turns as she wondered if she would see him again, and if so, under what circumstances. It was a queer sort of thing to dwell so long on just how a husband's hand might destroy you, and she felt uncomfortable as this possibility intruded more and more. What would she do in that state? Would she seek to kill him? To drag him down to the same debasement as herself? And he, how would he do it? Would he be able to? – and if he didn't what was to become of him? Poor Jonathan and his gentle heart – just how would a man like that, warm and guileless, who thought it a necessity to set spiders out of the house and to thrust a hay-penny into the hands of every beggar... How would he cope with so intimate an event as murder?

Her breath was slow as the landscape continued to rush past, and she thought back to Exeter, the bells of the cathedral sounding as he'd wrapped his hands around hers and asked if she'd like to be something else besides an assistant schoolmistress. He hadn't put it that way, of course, but she had known that the change in "situation" was as much a part of the pact as the "I dos." Dowery-less, penniless, connectionless, with perhaps a well-bred mother to her name if you skimmed away whatever Mister Murray was... some amorphous chimera that managed to be Iberian, Hebraic, Catholic and Bohemian at once. And yet... as natural a thought as it might be, she felt an awful mercenary when it had crossed her mind. She loved him madly, greedily, with a wholeness that should have denied self-concern. And yet...

And yet there were always "and yets..." She ought have developed something of a callous regarding them by now, but each little one still left her feeling guilty, and she couldn't help but half-wonder if they might be atoned for when somebody finally slipped a blade into her heart. "Light of all lights..." How little men knew. Nobody could say it had been for his money that she'd engaged herself to and wed an equally orphaned solicitor's clerk... but still, she couldn't deny, especially not now, that some part of her had desired a sort of safety in the bargain – somebody to prop her up so that she didn't have to stand alone anymore.

" _Are you not standing alone now?"_

The sun, obfuscated as it was, shone high above them, and she felt certain that the words came from no other devil other than her own inconstant doubting. She felt sick, and tried not to think on it longer than necessary, letting the grey day continue to pass around her in its dream-like fashion. The Count would, as always, be waiting for her at its end, desirous and demanding – and for once Mina welcomed that distraction. As evening wended its way to dusk and the strange lucidity of sleep overtook her, she made no attempt to resist it.

 

* * *

Night turned to day and back again, time moving in lurches as the two spheres between which she was caught seemed less and less distinct. As her encounters with the Count grew more vivid, she found that her memories of them came and went throughout the day, never staying quite where and when she wished them. Mina felt as though she were living inside of herself – a tiny being piloting some great machine, like the chessmaster hidden in his clockwork Turk. She assumed that Van Helsing must be aware of the change, for he spoke to her less and less when she wasn't in the midst of a trance, addressing to her only to bid her eat or give her morning and night recitations: "The creak of cartwheels and wood." There was a relief in the comparative solitude, for all that she knew she could never be truly alone. The Count never seemed to leave her now, and through snowfields and forests, battlefields and castles, he and she both wore on, restless and relentless, as they both moved ever steadily toward the end of it all.

It seemed strange when the old man at last pitied her in her sickness, for as full of pity as his heart must be, he had seemingly not wished to draw attention to it in nights past. He wrung her hand, trembling as he looked at her. "There, there, brave child. We are nearing the end. There will soon be time for you to rest." Rest – there was a finality to the word, and she would have laughed were she less in control of herself. Rest. One way or another, the chase would complete itself, and she would find herself without a direction in which to move.

She forced herself to eat when they stopped, swallowing tasteless lumps of tack and pork sausage until she felt leaden and sick. However many days they had left, she couldn't afford to be faint when the moment came, and the gesture of eating was a way of placing herself amongst the living, as wretched as it felt. _"You will know the comfort of far fairer feasts, I assure you."_ Wolves. The racing of wind. The sound of pallid fat-faced babes gasping when they could not cry. She was with him and he would not leave her, sleeping, waking, in daylight or at night. Her memories seemed to spin around themselves, and she felt as though she was being slowly torn asunder – the Mina who rode across the snow when waking, the Mina who chanted her calm descriptions in a trance, and the Mina who was forever somewhere and someone else altogether... somewhere and someone _with him,_ tracing the line of the mountains, taking prey in the chaos of the Saxons' revolt, running bestial and mindless through the never-ending expanse of the burning forests. They were never truly apart now, for all they touched upon one another in different ways. They had converged and would not be untangled.

Days flew past or halted at his whim, and she could only do her best in keeping up the pretense that she was alone when Van Helsing spoke to her. Everything seemed a shadow of itself. The fire, the cry of horses, the circle. They watched as the old man tried his cantrips and charms, fetishes trimmed from the papacy – watched as his past conquests came to plead her to join in what had already overtaken her. Sisters, indeed. He showed little concern for them, poor cringing creatures. The women had ceased to move him long ago, and he had abandoned them. _"Perhaps they seek to take you in the hopes I will show them grace,"_ he mused. "Perhaps they seek to slay me in the hopes of showing you scorn." Their minds moved in concert, even as she watched her poor body twist beneath them, suffocating in the aura of the Host. She stood outside herself and he, however many miles away, stood with her.

Bits and snatches of her past wormed her way back to her as she watched the fire dim: her mud-coated feet bruised by pebbles as she dragged her bedraggled friend back home; nights spent listening to the rattling of his wings on the window pane; the spin of the needle on the phonograph cylinder. "In trance she dies. In trance she is undead too." Her mind, riven as it was, grasped the significance of those words, etched in the machinery of her brain as they had once been in wax. "Was it the same with her?" Her words were cold – heavy and numb as her body below. _"No."_ She saw Lucy as she had been in this same inbetween, hovering too on the precipice of death. She did not struggle, did not fight, she only looked away from the beast that clasped her throat, and dying, winced. The memory of her face seemed unclear as it passed from the Count to Mina, phasing in and out with the forms of the three women in the snow, with nameless others yet apart from them – a girl in a cartwheel hat, a peasant lying by the road with straw in her hair, a half-strangled child with grey watery eyes.

"And I will end up like them?" She thought, knowing already the answer to the question.

" _I will not tell you pleasant lies, but I would not would not expend my efforts upon you thus if I believed so."_

"I thought my lot was portioned to me on my friends' account. Their 'best beloved' as you put it."

" _It was."_

"And now?"

There was no reply she could discern save for the further dimming of the world from which she had been taken – her other self fading with other concerns. Time and whatever meaning it carried with it had stopped for them. Events occurred passively, bereft of their causes. As she witnessed the endlessness of the hilly landscape below her, Mina watched with detached fascination the rise and fall of her own chest, feeling now and again the sting of wind on her cheeks as the snow fell upon her and stuck to the heavy wool of her traveling dress. She wondered if the body beneath her was dying, for she could not see herself in herself any longer.

"Why me?" she asked coldly after what seemed a long while.

" _You know."_

She didn't. In this moment, Mina barely knew where or who she was. She might well be nothing more than a fluttering of thoughts, memories and sensations bound together between two points in space. She knew only that she was sick of all this misery and that the Count was its source, whatever else he might claim. If he did deem her different than the others... if he gave her more mind than he gave his wailing concubines or those doomed wretches he'd hunted on London's streets... No. it was a silly thing to ask why he carried on as he did. Tormenting her was a part of his esteem, she supposed. Whatever his name or origin, whatever sympathies he thought they might share, he was a predator, and he knew only a predator's affection. There was an honesty to that, perhaps... a lack of pretense which she could vaguely admire somewhere in the maelstrom of her worried thoughts... but a predator's love was painful, and it ended poorly for whomever became its object.

Mina, as far as she was Mina, knew all this, understood it, but wasn't satisfied. Nothing about this scenario would ever be satisfying. She was more than tired now, and as it had been so many times before, she couldn't muster the willpower to varnish over her loathing with rationality. Once more, she wanted only to kill him, and this time she wanted him to suffer as she did it, hounded, brutalized, and half-mad.

There.

If she could laugh... laugh in that same mirthless way Lucy had while looking at the sunset, she would have. If there was an understanding to be had between them... there it was. Mina, for all her "woman's heart" and talk of compassion, hated him and everything he forced her to remember just as surely and violently as he hated the world – that was the only thing she could think that they shared and that she knew to be true.

"Murder me now, then!" she thought and said and screamed all at once, "Bring me to bow before I find a way to destroy you!"

And the Count – whatever his true name or title or history – wherever his body or hers lay – was suddenly upon her.

She fought, and as often as she'd fought him before there seemed a finality to this struggle. It was not without difficulty this time that he wrested her, body and soul, back down onto the blank canvass of white. Mina no longer thought of pain, no longer thought of escape... She no longer even thought of Jonathan. Everything was lost in a maddened rage now, two decades of never expressed defiance finally breaking the polite barriers she'd set around them to vent themselves upon her adversary.

He did not laugh now. He did not chide or mock her or say anything enigmatic or meaningful. He pushed her, grasped her hands until she imagined she could hear the bones within them splinter and crack. She didn't care. If he wanted to possess her, he would have to break all the others. There was no pretending anymore, no cool strategizing or womanly feints. She clawed with broken fingers at his skin. She kicked, howled, cried... If she could murder him a thousand times over, crush his brain under her boot heels, rend his flesh to pieces... none of it would be enough. She would rather he razed the world and killed all things she'd ever held dear than to suffer another moment that pleased him, and if that condemned her to the same hell...

" _Blood of my blood."_

Mina didn't care... if she was like him, if she had always been like him... it didn't matter. She would be as terrible and cruel as she liked now – as awful as she had been in all the scenes of murder shared between them – as awful as that and worse. In this moment, battered and bloody, she felt nothing that wasn't anger – anger to fill the emptiness with which he had left her, to flood those spaces drained away by increments as he'd harrowed her across the land and sea.

She bit him as he tried to wrench her arms away from him, her teeth rending dully into his cold flesh as she found that herself suddenly possessed of a hunger wide enough to devour him whole.

 

* * *

 

Mina awoke to the feeling of a hand laid over her forehead, blinking her eyes open slowly as she felt the hot-cold burn of a fever running over her skin. She gave out a sharp whimper as the light hit her eyes, frightened of something she could not quite place. The dreams, as always, receded quickly, although she felt quite certain for a moment that something other than the chill of the wind was leaving its bite across her body.

"We're almost there, poor child – but you must get up."

Mina nodded as she looked up at Van Helsing's weather-beaten face, her throat aching too sharply for her to speak just yet. She smoothed a hand through her hair as she began to sit up, trying faintly to remember what it was this time that had jarred her so in her sleep.

"It's only a bit farther," he spoke gently, as though he might bruise her if his voice rose too far above a whisper. "You will keep being strong for us, no?" He breathed into his hands to warm them and then wrapped them around hers, and she realized how cold she had become as she felt the pinpricks of melting numbness spread across her hands.

"Is everything alright?" she asked hoarsely, at last, "I feel as though I've been asleep for a long time."

"Everything is fine, my good lady," he said solemnly, "It was not the most well of nights."

She nodded, "We'd best leave the site of it then. Come." She swallowed with some difficulty. "I ought go to meet my husband."


End file.
